Critical Muslim geographies through a critical geography of Islamophobia

Abstract

In this commentary, I focus on James Sidaway's contribution to critical Muslim geographies and his suggestions for moving beyond decoloniality that do not hesitate to take a stand against the current direction of mainstream studies on Islam and Muslims. While I agree with many of his points, I detail three critical thoughts around (i) the idea of integrating terminologies specific to Islam and Muslims into the scholarship of Muslim geographies to transcend existing colonial logics; (ii) the need to give a greater voice to Muslim geographers as Black and feminist geographies have done; and (iii) the difficulty of measuring the Muslim identity of geographers. Drawing on my critical thinking about the geographies of Islamophobia, I highlight how normalized structural practices have led to silencing the voices of even the greatest geographers in human history.